The late great activist, Abbie
Hoffman, used to phone the basketball Hall-of-Famer, Bill Walton, to give sports
advice when Walton was playing for the Boston Celtics. I don’t know if the team
ever took his suggestions.

When I was helping to organize a national
convention of student activists at Rutgers University in February 1988, Abbie was our student group’s major adviser. In the lead-up
to the convention, officially called National Student Convention ’88, we took
most of his suggestions. Indeed, it was an Abbie
trick months earlier that had led some Rutgers organizers into putting together
and hosting the conference in the first place.

About a half-dozen Rutgers activists,
including my then-partner, Christine Kelly, had gone up to watch Abbie, Amy Carter (Jimmy’s daughter), and about nine other
students put the CIA on trial. Arrested after sitting down in the middle of a
road to make a statement against CIA recruitment at the University of
Massachusetts, they put on a trial that should be much more well-known than it
is. I wonder if it isn’t more well-known solely because it wasn’t as theatrical
as Abbie’s most famous trial, the trial of the Chicago 8?

Arguing the “necessity defense,” Abbie, Amy, and witnesses for the defense like historian
Howard Zinn and former CIA–agent Ralph McGehee convinced a jury of six average New Englanders that
the minor crime of trespassing was necessary to attempt to halt larger crimes
of CIA covert actions around the world, especially, at that time, the support
of murderous right-wing paramilitary groups in Central America. In Abbie’s closing argument, he told the jury that “democracy
is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat, but it’s
something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and
falls apart.” Appealing to the jury’s sense of patriotism, he asked the jurors
to “say what Thomas Paine said: Young people, don’t give up hope. If you
participate, the future is yours.” The fact that this jury agreed with Abbie and the rest of the defendants was amazing proof that
typical Americans would oppose U.S. foreign policy if they only had more
information about what their government was doing.

During this 1987 trial, Abbie
told the students who had come up to watch, most of whom were organizing
CIA-off-campus campaigns at their own schools, that some students had called a
big meeting to talk about creating a new mass-based, multi-issue,
democratically structured, national student activist group modeled after the
1960s group, Students for a Democratic Society. When people went to the
meeting, everyone looked around to see which students had called it; no one
had. Abbie had tricked over 100 student activists
into getting together to talk about starting a new national activist group! Abbie always believed that young people had the impatience
needed to create social change, and he thought a new national student activist
group was desperately needed to change the increasingly conservative American
political landscape of the late 80s. The Rutgers students at the meeting agreed
to host a founding convention.

As the convention date approached, the Rutgers
organizers were expecting about 200 students to come from around the country.
That would already be almost four times as many student activists as went to
Port Huron, Michigan, for the founding conference of SDS. As part of the
organizing process, Abbie sent Christine long 10-page
letters filled with organizing strategies and contact names, and he did a
speaking tour of universities around the country, telling students that our
upcoming conference was going to be the most important student-activist gathering
of the decade. Since the convention had to be seen as student-led in order to
have any chance of success, Abbie’s time-consuming
work in providing strategic advice remained behind the scenes, contradicting
the myth believed by some critics that Abbie was a
chronic attention-seeker. In the end—through a combination of good organizing
by Rutgers students, compelling times and a worthwhile project, and Abbie’s speaking tour—700 students from 46 states
registered for our convention.

The opening, welcoming event on Friday
evening was scheduled for a room that comfortably fit 250 people. Abbie loved the idea of seeing 700 students crammed into
that room—he thought it would send a powerful message to the media that a
fast-growing new student movement was bursting beyond anyone’s expected seams.
But university officials had a different idea—they thought it would be a major
fire-code hazard and they demanded the organizers move the welcoming event into
a 2,000-person gym, threatening to shut down the conference completely if the
organizers didn’t comply. The student-organizing Logistics Committee was
leaning toward accepting the university’s demand, not wanting to take a chance
on having the conference shut down, and figuring the administration did have a
point about the risk of squeezing 700 students into a much-too-small lecture
hall.

When Abbie heard
that the Logistics Committee was thinking about acceding to the university’s
demand, he immediately told me that was a terrible idea, that the gym was way
too big, that the media would see the conference as an underwhelming failure,
and that students with different political ideas would immediately, like boxers
entering a ring, go into their own separate corners. Instead of having a
unified, bursting-at-the-seams opening event, we would have a convention
hopelessly divided from the opening bell. I trusted Abbie’s
insights and experience and brought him into a side room to meet with our
Logistics Committee. I think the committee took Abbie’s
ideas seriously, but still thought the university’s threat to shut the
convention weighed more heavily. So the welcoming event was moved to the
2,000-person gym.

Within two minutes, Abbie
was proven prophetic. A large group of student anarchists, who had come to this
national convention to push the idea that any new national group would
necessarily be structurally oppressive and that students should organize
locally and regionally instead, went into one corner. The anarchists at the
conference were mostly from Boston or Berkeley, where there were many
universities with progressive students capable of forming strong regional
groups, and they didn’t understand the way that a new national organization
might help small activist groups in Utah or Alabama feel much less isolated.
Democratic-left students who believed in the goal of creating a new SDS-type
national student group went into a second corner. And students who were already
members of existing activist groups and who wondered whether a new national
formation might be a threat to their own organizations went into the third and
fourth corners.

And that was the end of the idea of forming a
large, multi-issue, democratically structured national student activist
organization in the late 1980s. Some difficult issues came up during the
conference, including the question of whether there was yet enough multi-racial
unity in the U.S. student movement to justify starting a new national
student-activist group, or whether more work should be done on that front
before a new organization was formed. At the close of the convention, a few
smaller projects were initiated, and in following months, several different
organizations were created. The democratic-left students at the conference,
including those of us from Rutgers, created a group called Student Action Union
that was founded in North Carolina at a meeting organized by an energetic law
student, Joel Segal, who later went on to work as a Senior Aide in Congress for
John Conyers, where Joel wrote a bill for a national single-payer Medicare for
All health care reform plan for which tens of thousands of health care
activists around the country are still advocating. The anarchists at the
convention formed their own group, based in Boston, beginning with a meeting of
200 and reaching consensus on the group’s founding principles and structure
early the next morning with about a dozen students left, a perfect illustration
of why Abbie had given speeches in his later years
about the need for larger activist groups to use majority instead of consensus
decision-making—according to Abbie, small groups in
the early 60s used consensus, but it became more difficult to reach consensus
when the groups got bigger and there were often three FBI agents and two
schizophrenics in the room! Both of these new student activist groups created
in the late 80s lasted only a few years and then dissipated, dissolving
themselves into larger coalitions that came together to oppose the first Gulf
War. As America moved from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush’s son, I considered
the inability to fulfill Abbie’s vision of a national
student activist group in the late 1980s to be a sadly missed opportunity for
young people to potentially shift the direction of the country.

Abbie had an amazing overarching vision of how to create social change with
a combination of wit, humor, information, and creativity. He also had a great
instinct for the details.